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__TOC__ Ratemall Corporation uses the Automated Ratings System (ARS) for promotion, award and assignment recommendations, as well as for counseling and performance improvement. The ARS is a "system of fives." Every employee is required to select one of five responses to five factors evaluating five other employees every month. The persons to be rated each month are selected by the ARS from the employee's "Core List," which contains the names of at least five persons whom the employee must regularly rate. The employee's "Extended List" contains the names of as many as 15 other persons whom the employee must occasionally rate. When visiting the ARS Web site, an employee sees his/her own Home Page, but can navigate from there to the page for any other employee. Home Page Let's assume that you are an employee named Jonathan Studeman. You have already rated four employees this month. With a mouse click on your ARS page, you have selected the name of another employee, Jane Doe, which is now highlighted. You are Jane's supervisor. Your page looks like this. Monthly Rating Requirement Each month the ARS selects the names to be rated that month from a list of persons that the employee is required to rate, called the "Core List," and also from a list of persons that the employee is merely eligible to rate, called the "Extended List." The Core List always contains at least five names, and the two lists, combined, total 20 names. To be eligible for promotion or award, an employee must rate five employees each calendar month. If, at the end of the month, an employee has not done so, the ARS will require that more be rated the next month, and the employee regains eligibility when the deficit is made up. The Core List The supervisor and the employee must agree on a list of no fewer than five names for the Core List. These names can be changed at any time, so long as the supervisor and the employee agree, but must at all times include the supervisor, the supervisor's other direct subordinates (those that have regular contact with the employee), and the employee's own immediate subordinates if the employee is a supervisor. If that number is fewer than five, the supervisor and employee will need to select others with whom the employee has regular professional contact in order to make up the difference. (The manager can and should be included if the manager has regular professional contact with the employee.) At any time, the supervisor or the employee can make whatever changes to the Core List seem desirable or necessary, as when someone on the list changes jobs. If the supervisor adds or removes a name, a new proposed list is submitted to the employee for approval, and if the employee adds or removes a name, a new proposed list is submitted to the supervisor for approval. This continues until a new list proposed by one of them is approved by the other without changes. If never changed, the core list must be re-approved by both at least once per year. The ARS itself generates the Extended List, using names selected from: :* Core Lists of other employees; :* email aliases associated with the employee's office; and, :* organizational charts. The Core List and Extended List are displayed side-by-side. To add a name to the Core List, a name is simply dragged there from the Extended List or searched for in a drop-down Global List of all employees. To remove a name from the Core List, the name is selected and dragged into the Extended List or into the Global List. Ratings Only five rating factors must be addressed, and there are only five possible ratings for each. In this example, you are rating an employee who is intelligent, highly educated and has taken a lot of corporate training courses. He is the most highly qualified expert that you know of, and in your experience he frequently comes up with new and better ways of doing business. Unfortunately, he is also arrogant, abrasive,and unreliable. Often he is absent or late for work and for meetings. You have frequently observed him missing deadlines, failing to complete his assignments, and making evasive excuses for every lapse, often angrily blaming others. In working groups, everyone looks to him as a leader, acknowledging his expertise and the value of his ideas, but he is usually disinterested, dismissive of the ideas of others, and disruptive. How would you choose to rate such a person for each of the five factors? Point at the radio button under each option to see what the option means. :* The option of "No opinion" is not available for persons who are on your Core List. No person should be on your Core List unless you and your supervisor agree that you are in a position to have a well-informed opinion on all of the five rating factors. :* When rating someone on your Extended List, if "No opinion" is selected for three of more factors, you will not receive credit for rating that person. However, you will then be asked to rate another person selected from your Extended List, so that your quota of five ratings per month can be fulfilled. :* If all five factors are rated and the person is not already on your Core List, the system will ask whether — with supervisor approval — you want to add the person. ARS Report For every employee, the ARS generates and continually updates a 3-part report that is based on all the ratings submitted by all employees. The ARS report is hidden from everyone until and unless it is "valid," and then it is made available only to authorized viewers. :* To be valid, current ratings by 10-or-more credible others (see below) must reflect a consensus of opinion on all rating factors. :* Current means that the ratings were gathered within the past 6 months. :* Consensus exists when the standard deviation of the ratingsStandard deviation is a statistical measure of how widely or narrowly a range of values spreads from the mean (average) value. A small standard deviation (less than 1) indicates that the values are grouped very tightly around the mean. A large standard deviation indicates that the values are spread out more evenly across the range of possible values. is less than one. Pre-authorized Access: Only the employee, the supervisor and the manager have continuous, pre-authorized access to a report. The members of the Promotion and Awards Board also have access to the report, but only when the Board has received a recommendation for promotion or award. The Board loses its access after a determination is made. Access Upon Request: An employee may, from time to time, grant 10-day access to other persons, and should normally do so when applying for a new assignment or when recommended for a new assignment. An access request is generated whenever a person who is not pre-authorized to view a report attempts to access the report. The person who attempts such access is asked to either select the purpose from a short list or type the purpose into a text box. The employee is then automatically notified and is required to explicitly grant or deny access. If the request is being made for one of the standard purposes on the list, the employee is required to state a reason if denying the request. Part I: Credibility Assessment The report begins with an assessment of how well or poorly the employee has rated other employees. This is based on a statistical analysis of the ratings submitted by the employee in comparison with the ratings of the same persons by other employees, as well as with the ARS credibility assessments of all employees. If, for a given person and a given factor, the rating submitted by the employee differs from the mean rating by more than one and by more than the standard deviation, that rating is flagged as "questionable." In other words, if a rating is outside the range of the standard deviation but is still only "off" by one (e.g., below average versus average), it is nonetheless accepted as at least "credible." And, if a rating is "off" by more than one but is still within the range of the standard deviation, that rating, too, is still accepted as credible. The only ratings flagged as questionable are those that differ from the average rating by more than one and that lie outside the range of the standard deviation. Individual flags are not revealed in the report. Instead, the system looks at the ratio of "questionable" to "credible" ratings and compares it with the system-wide average. * If the employee has a ratio that is high to a statistically significant degree, the report says, "Less than credible. This employee has submitted a significantly high number of ratings that differ widely from the consensus." * If the employee has a ratio that does not differ from the corporate average in a statistically significant way, the ARS reports that the employee's participation in the system has been "Credible." * If the employee has not submitted the required number of ratings, the system reports that the employee's credibility is "Not assessible." Such an employee is not eligible for promotion or award. Part II: How the Employee was Rated by Others The report next shows an assessment of the employee for each of the five factors, as well as an overall assessment, based on how he was rated by credible others. This is based on the mean rating for each factor for which there was a consensus (standard deviation of less than 1), which excludes any ratings that were not credible (were more than one position off the mean rating and were outside the range of the standard deviation). If there is no consensus for a factor, the entire report is deemed not valid and remains inaccessible.The ARS is designed to avoid and remedy "No consensus" situations by bringing in more names and systematically shifting names in and out of every employee's extended list. This ensures that each employee is rated by a sufficient number of persons who are close enough to the employee to have a credible first-hand opinion on most or all of the rating factors.. Part III: The ARS Recommendation The report concludes by making a recommendation to the Board or to other decision makers. To arrive at this final ARS recommendation, points are awarded for the credibility assessment from Part I and for the overall rating reflected in Part II, and then simple addition produces the result. Four points equates to Strongly Recommended. Three points earns Recommended. Two points are Worthy of Consideration. One means Eligible for Consideration, and zero points equals Ineligible. As shown, every employee who is in good standing within the ARS and has an overall rating of Acceptable is at least eligible to be considered for an award, a promotion or a challenging assignment. * But to be deemed worthy of consideration, an average employee must have participated in the ARS in a credible manner. * Similarly, every superior employee will automatically be recommended unless his/her participation has been less than credible. * And, likewise, every excellent employee will be strongly recommended, assuming that the employee has performed credibly within the system. This provides a very strong and necessary incentive for employees to rate carefully and without bias. Ill-considered ratings harm the employee who submits them by significantly lowering his or her chances of being promoted or awarded. Biased ratings have the exact same effect. And what is more, ill-considered or biased ratings cannot in any way benefit or harm the persons who receive them! For example, if I have a friend who, for a particular factor, is a below average employee and I give this friend a superior rating simply because he is a friend, that rating will do harm to my own credibility and will do him no good. Since it is likely to lie far from the consensus, it will be discounted as not credible. Therefore, my friend and I both know, going in, that I cannot possibly help a friend — nor harm an enemy — by submitting a biased rating. I can only harm myself. Examples A Superior Employee An Excellent Employee An Inferior Employee A Superior Employee Who Does Not Participate in the ARS Recommendation Forms Supervisors recommend, managers endorse, and a corporate Board decides on promotions and awards. Forms for promotion or award recommendation include a checkbox for the manager's endorsement of the recommendation. If the option "not endorsed" is checked, the manager must provide a brief explanation. However, a recommendation can come also from a person who is not the supervisor. In that case, the recommendation still normally goes to the manager, who will normally obtain the supervisor's decision to endorse or not-endorse before sending it along to the Board. But a manager, or supervisor, or anyone, may choose to send a recommendation to the Board without an endorsement, though that is very rare and unlikely to be successful. To do this, the person submitting the recommendation must check the "Not endorsed" box for the supervisor and/or manager and must provide an explanation as to why the recommendation is being submitted without a normal endorsement. The "Endorsed" box can be checked only by the authorized person (by the supervisor or by the manager), and will be digitally signed. But the "Not endorsed" box, which will also be digitally signed, can be checked by anyone. Again, normally, the supervisor or the manager is the one who would normally check these boxes and provide any required explanation. He/she then sends the recommendation "up" if endorsed (up to the manager or up to the Board) or "back" if not endorsed (back to the person from whom the recommendation came). If a not-endorsed recommendation "comes back," the originator can still decide to forward it to the Board, so long as the "Not endorsed" box(es) have been checked and digitally signed, and so long as explanations have been provided. A similar form exists for recommending disciplinary action. The title of the form is different, and the form is routed to a separate, Disciplinary Board. However, everything else is the same. Typically, a supervisor recommends and a manager endorses, but anyone can recommend, and anyone can submit the form with or without endorsements, though the same "Not endorsed" box(es) must be checked, and explanation(s) provided.